Suzy Menkes

#SuzyPFW: The Extraordinary Originality Of Japanese Design

Undercover: Imaginative reality

There was grace, there was beauty and that rare tension when a designer shifts imperceptibly from fashion to art. Jun Takahashi, Undercover's designer, worked on the original soundtrack compiled with Thom Yorke that introduced, at different stages of the presentation, mythical figures created to represent a hierarchy of monarchy and aristocracy, but also young rebels and agitators.

They took over the stage with extraordinary pageantry, the 'queen,' in her pink, accordion-pleated crinoline, folding her body as she bowed before her followers. The music and modern dance offered a trance-like tranquillity.

But all that was interspersed with the wearable, colourful Undercover clothes that can best be described as sports or street wear with a twist of originality.

Backstage, the designer spoke through an interpreter to explain his concept of a "new race, living in Utopia."

"An ideal world would be that everyone is equal, no difference in colour, or whatever,” Takahashi said. “Although there are queens and princesses, everybody is still equal."

I persisted that that the list the designer had drawn up included soldiers, wardens and clergy – still very much a traditional class structure. The reply was: "What I am trying to describe is not a reality – it is between insects and human beings – a very fictional world."

The artist seemed to prefer to express his vision though creativity on stage, rather than words. The concept appeared to be ordinary clothes made extraordinary by unexpected flourishes, such as giant feathers decorating a jumpsuit worn with wedge heeled sneakers. Strip off the embellishments and you had a streamlined modern outfit.

Sometimes, there were just real clothes: a tailored coat, a shrunken, double breasted jacket, or a simple glitter-striped sweater, cropped above the waist and worn with soft yellow trousers. The everyday slipped into the land of magic when a ruff was slid under the neck of a bomber jacket; or when the models were re-interpreted as 'bee people,' some with hive-like sleeves or apiarists' netting on their faces.

But magic cannot easily be described. Better to go with the flow of this exceptional show.

Fashion Shows

Undercover, Herbst 2017

Issey Myake: Chromatic fantasia

The setting was brand new for the Issey Miyake show. Or, rather the historic crystal chandeliers and gilded building of Paris's Hôtel de Ville was an unexpected backdrop for the modernist Japanese house.

"Aurora: a veil enveloping the sky," he wrote, continuing to describe, "Releasing, overlapping, intertwining, rippling, shimmering and changing" as an endless "cycle of re-creations. The vitality of life."

But what hit the audience was colour: grey-blue with green and plum; vivid purple for a draped trench; shades of green and burnt orange; turquoise for dresses – and then all those colours growing brighter as the models walked the runway.

But that was not all. Inspired by the beauty of the Aurora Borealis, the designer picked wool from Shetland sheep, "born and bred under the Northern lights" as he put it, and then wove the colours into the material. But there was more! The ingenious Miyake studios have produced thread which changes colour according to the angle from which it is viewed. Add ultra-suede strips, woven in, and you had a kind of performance art: normal, sporty, streamlined clothes but with the ability, literally, to shine.

There were also the famous Miyake stretch pleats, baked – with a glue baked in the pleats – or steamed, with pleats worked into a single piece of cloth.

What was new this season was a bounce effect, so that the apparently simple coats and dresses, more traditional garments than in many previous shows, responded to movement. As with so many Miyake pieces, the clothes that appear so simple are the hardest to define. But Yoshiyuki Miyamae did it for us with these poetic words:

"An abundance of blessings ran down on me – at the edge of explanation and awe."

Fashion Shows

Issey Miyake, Herbst 2017

Yohji Yamamoto: Artistic and playful

So, the Yohji Yamamoto collection was mostly in black. No surprises there. Oh, but there were! As Yohji took his bow, with a little jig and the doffing of his signature hat, he knew that he had achieved his goal by revealing the powers and depths of the dark with its flashes of illumination.

But just in case no one had understood that from the outset Yohji had seen black, with its many different shades and textures, as a colour, he showed his artistic side. Streaks of red or green painted at the side of a black dress or the same dabs of colour, used in fringing and feathery pieces of fabric, gave a further perspective to the dark side of his work.

Shaping through draping was the real story, as materials were used on the bias to make a hemline swoop from upper leg to ankle or a coat drape cross-ways over the breast.

To get material artfully draped is a monumental task, because no woman wants clothes with lumps and bumps, but each piece had its subtle fall of fabric arranged in harmonious relationship to the female form. The endless variety included dresses loosed and bunched into ties in the top half, hanging free below; or that method upturned so that a taut zippered jacket was above a froufrou skirt.

Add a red eye, dark lips and a dangling of key rings on a chain and all that work on fabric added up to a charming collection.